NonGMFarmer and Ludwig,

Where I stand in this debate is with people like David Holmgren and the sustainable agricultural practices, otherwise known as 'Permaculture', which he advocates.

I am not, in principle, opposed to altering our natural environment in order to make it more fertile and more productive, provided that the additional productivity is sustainable and not based on the use of increasingly scarce fossil fuel based fertilisers and pesticides.

All too often past attempts to make the land more fertile have only had the opposite effect, in the longer term, as Ludwig has shown. I am not completely sure that what NonGMFarmer is doing is altogether wrong, but we have to tread extremely carefully if past mistakes are not to be repeated.

In the long term, almost all agricultural produce will have to be produced and consumed locally, simply because rising petroleum costs will make it impossible to move agricultural produce enormous distances on the scale that we do today.

The obverse side of this coin is that people who consume this produce will, themselves, have to live close to where it is produced, and many more will have to participate in its production, which will have to be more labour intensive, when petroleum becomes scarce.

Some city residents may be able to remain within current urban areas if there is sufficient land to sustain agriculture, such as on the remaining quarter acre block housing estates. However, many of those now 'consolidated' (i.e. crowded) into apartment blocks will have to move elsewhere if they want to be able to eat.

Also, the chemical cycle, which has been broken by modern civilisation, particularly due to the establishment of large scale sewerage systems, must be re-established. Nutrients taken from the soil can no longer be exported vast distances, often to end up in land fill mixed up with toxic chemicals and metals, or to be flushed out to sea. They will have to be returned to the soil to maintain its fertility over hundreds of generations and not just decades at most.

I commend Ted Trainer's excellent talk on Ockham's Razor this morning at:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1515951.htm

... which was in reponse to Jennifer Morahasy's talk of the previous week at:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1509193.htm

I would be most interested to see Jennifer Marohasy's response to Ted Trainer's talk, particularly to these points:

"Some resources are already alarmingly scarce, including water, land, fish and especially petroleum. Some geologists think oil supply will peak within a decade. If all the world’s people today were to consume resources at the per capita rate we in rich countries do, annual supply would have to be more than six times as great as at present, and if the 9 billion we will have on earth soon were to do so, it would have to be about ten times as great. ..."

"If we in Australia average 3% growth to 2070 and by then the 9 billion people expected on earth have all risen to the living standards we would have then, total world economic output each year would be 60 times as great as it is now. Yet the present level is grossly unsustainable.

"Many respond here by saying that Yes, the problems are very serious but No, we don’t have to think about moving from consumer-capitalist society because more effort and better technology could solve the problems. It only takes a few seconds to show that this tech-fix position is wrong. The overshoot is far too big.

"Technical-fix optimists like Amory Lovins claim we could cut the resource and ecological costs per unit of economic output to half or one quarter. But if global output rose to 60 times what it is now, even a Factor Four reduction by 2070 would leave global resource and environmental costs 15 times as great as they are now, and they are unsustainable now."

I also commend Ted Trainer's "Simpler Way" web-site at:

http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/

Re: Ted Trainer on Okham’s Razor. Hell’s bells what an awful article. Talk about depressing. What an enormous contrast with Jennifer Marohasy’s ‘everything is just fine’ message.

I find it really interesting that he didn’t mention population size or growth rate as one of the fundamental causes of our problems. “The fundamental cause of the big global problems threatening us now is simply over-consumption”. But he then went on to talk about scenarios with projected global population growth and the fact that even really big reductions in resource consumption on a per-capita basis are just going to be completely overwhelmed by the ever-increasing number of ‘capitas’.

I agree with his criticism of techno-fix people like Amory and Hunter Lovins, who just completely ignore the other side of the equation – continuously increasing population. Just about the whole environment movement in Australia is similarly one-sided in the quest for sustainability. This enormous blind spot with population issues persists, right into the end-days of our civilisation.

While Trainer seems to have a blind-spot or an abject aversion to the population label, he does at least seem to give the issue due recognition. A strange thing that!

Anyway, I think he is exactly right with his extremely grim message. Similarly, Diamond is close to the mark. And Marohasy is just terribly terribly wrong.

I'm not sure how the planet can be very sustainable with our current populations if we had not touched the environment. Think about where your food, your furniture etc came from.
As mentioned, we have done many projects like fencing off remnant vegetation - this costs us alot of money (land out of production, fencing, wages etc) and returns us none. It is a tribute to the environment.
Like everyone else on the planet, we need to make a living and most farmers have huge debts that don't allow us to sit back and watch the native vegetation grow on all of the land we or our forefathers paid a fortune for.

NonGMFarmer

Picking up on some of your other comments:

You write; “I think there is far too much government funding towards 'environmental' issues wasted on building up mountains of paperwork and employing a flocadia of acadamia rather than the on-the-ground-treatment that works.” Is there something wrong with employing the services of academics, who have achieved their positions by becoming very knowledgeable in their fields? Where would we be without their input? On-the-ground-treatment that works needs a sound basis in its methodology. A combination of academics, farmers and others will achieve the best results, not farmers alone. If farmers did it in isolation, some would do it well, others wouldn’t – it would be all over the place. But with the bureaucracy backing a united approach, so that all farmers are encouraged to have the same level of input, relative to the problems in their area, something can hopefully be achieved that wouldn’t otherwise. Thank goodness governments are doing something about land-degradation issues. Efficiencies can be improved, but at least it is happening. You should be very thankful for it.

“Narembeen which does have isolated problems but here the salt was there first and the inland river drainage system is there to manage it”. The salt is there in the first place in all these situations. It only gets taken to new places when it is mobilised into our rivers. The remnants of this inland drainage system ‘manage’ the salt by accumulating it in the now very broad shallow depressions that were once mighty rivers. But they don’t take it out of the soil in areas adjacent to the saltpans.

“We have found that often new problems can be traced to the road system blocking the natural drainage and drainage forming new pathways that lead to salt affected areas”. The problem is that the salt has been mobilised in the first place, due to massive overclearing. Roads blocking drainage lines, leading to noticeable accumulations of salt on the surface, are very much a secondary factor.

O no, the word count prevents further comment…. And I have so much more to say!

Further comments in response to NonGMFarmer;

You wrote; “Salt reclamation or prevention is not a quick fix solution, it is an integrated approach of observation, drainage, ensuring clearing is not too radical, fencing off areas that are looking salt prone, planting deep rooted lucerne on the heavy claypans that are looking vulnerable to allow subsoil drainage plus a multitude of others”. Yes, basically. But where did this come from – farmers’ stark realisation, greenies, bureaucrats or scientists? Certainly not from farmers alone. And there certainly isn’t any quick-fix solution. In fact, given the enormity of clearing in the WA wheatbelt (90% cleared), all remedial factors put together are minuscule. They are likely to do not much more than slow down the rate of salination a little. As I said early, a monster has been released and it is basically unstoppable, short of a truly monster-sized response like replanting 50% or more of the original vegetation or its equivalent and thus foregoing 50% of current productivity.

“Perhaps because of the early claim that this area is a barren wasteland led to the lateness of land clearing that helped us.” Yes, probably right. Although it may mean that the salinity monster has only bared its teeth and is yet to bite, whereas it is well-advanced elsewhere. With the remedial or preventative practices now being undertaken, it may simply hang around and plague the area for longer, still being present after it has been expunged elsewhere.

“With rising costs and lower commodity prices, farm profits are declining and Australian farmers aren't subsidised like our opposition so we must be more efficient”. Yes, but if you need to practice this high level of efficiency to get by now, then where will you be when salinity worsens (or when fuel prices increase?). High efficiency sounds good, but what it really means is that there is precious little room to move. Rather perversely perhaps, if farmers were practicing lower efficiency, they would have much more room to move in terms planting trees, fencing off suspect saline areas, etc. So, high efficiency doesn’t sound so good afterall